Phil Bronstein: No need to continue attack on Lara Logan

New York on the Potomac is pleased to share the best commentary from the top columnists of Hearst Newspapers. Today, we offer a column by Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle.

No piece of information in this digital age, no matter how irrefutable, goes unpunished.

Intrepid CBS reporter Lara Logan is the victim of a brutal sexual assault in the teeming streets of Cairo. This is a uniquely grim danger female correspondents face during chaotic situations in countries under the gun. Can we just simply note the horror of it, feel sympathy for Logan – now trying to recover in New York with her husband and kids – and move on?

No, we can’t. There’s a noise out there in the press, made louder with the cacophony of attached public commentary.

Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post that Logan’s “privacy was not as important as the story.” Wait, I thought the story was Egyptian revolution. But birth of a democracy seems to be taking a distant second to the allure of this individual assault. What happened, blow by degrading, mortifying blow? The public demands to know the “facts.”

These apparently include whom had she dated during her career, as though she were an accuser in a courtroom whose background an unscrupulous defense attorney is trying to make the issue.

Salon calls her “a gutsy stunner,” and “war zone ‘it’ girl.” Like, what? Attractive female journalists should stick to hometown zoo animal features? One comment on an L.A. Times story: “common sense tells you not to send a pretty blond into a raging group of men.” Or commenters.

President Obama phones her, which is appropriate but would have been an even kinder gesture had it not become part of the public record.

Then Nir Rosen, a fellow at New York University and frequent contributor to the New York Times, Atlantic and other august journals, won the disgraceful clown crown for slamming Logan’s reporting and saying she had to “outdo Anderson Cooper” in a bid for attention.

Rosen was soon bounced from his fellowship and tweeted that he was “deeply ashamed.”

But that started yet another debate about whether Rosen himself was a scurrilous troll or the victim of anti-free speech forces. I vote the former. An Esquire writer actually claimed both Rosen and Logan were “attacked by the same thing … mob mentality.” That’s a big stretch.

Sexual assault has always been a weapon of war, a vicious form of vanquishing and violating those who are often the most powerless and vulnerable.

But I never really thought sexual attack was a topic that should open the door to a debate about the life of the victim, or a piranha media frenzy over its coverage, whether it happens in Egypt, the Congo or through “wilding” in Central Park.

The website Jezebel said, “Maybe the media will learn how to have some (respect).” At Gawker, of all places, home of the mean-edged snark, Hamilton Nolan wrote a fine piece about whether we could make dangerous reporting safe. Good question. (We can’t, he concluded.)

Logan is the latest, tragic example of that. But because the dangers can’t be minimized, let’s not dissect the victims. Let’s leave her alone.